We are aiming for a comprehensive scalable software solution for electronic medical practice with emphasis on privacy protection, secure patient centric record sharing, decision support and ease of use.

We would emphasize that medical software is moving from a mere administration & documentation tool toward decision support.

A sophisticated decision support system, such as we eventually aim GNUmed to become, will elevate the quality of medical care that can be delivered.

We would consider it highly unethical to withhold such software from those who need it on the basis of restrictive licenses and costs. It is not acceptable that copyright potentially endangers human life.

Thus, we are aiming towards creating such free medical software suite, protected by the GPL from unethical misuse.

Note that while our source code will remain available in the Savannah CVS for the time being we now develop GNUmed with Git on gitorious.org. CVS HEAD is tagged with "frozen4conversion2git" if you care to check the source code state at the time of conversion from CVS to Git.

We need more developers competent in Python and PostgreSQL for the gnumed project (http://gnu.org/software/gnumed)
One of our main focuses at present is creating a reliable object-ralational mapper for our database purposes.

It is free because we believe that withholding computerized decision support (once it proves beneficial and potentially life saving) via commercial licenses from those who cannot afford them would be highly unethical.

We do not accept any funding in order to stay clear from entities that would cause conflict of interest (such as the pharmaceutical industry)

Thus, we cannot pay developers in any other terms then the warm fuzzy feeling of having done the right thing.